An expert integrated system is a set of components and servers. Traditionally, an expert integrated system took the form of a factory pre-configured set of hardware that could be physically delivered to a location, or locations. More recently, many expert integrated systems have become cloud based, so that there is not a strong correlation between the services provided to the expert systems customer and the specific, real world physical components that make up the expert integrated system at a given time.
Expert integrated systems include: (i) a flexible software-based system manager; and (ii) “patterns of expertise” for the automated configuration and management of the services provided by the expert integrated system. The patterns of expertise can provide field engineers' expertise from decades of system configuration. Preferably, these patterns of expertise offer industry-specific (for example, banking, insurance, automotive) defaults for the fully automatic and optimal orchestration of resources (for example, workload balancing).
Expert integrated systems may use various operating systems (now known or to be developed in the future). Expert integrated systems may include various kinds of hypervisors for various kinds of hardware architectures (for example, power architecture and/or x86). At least some expert integrated systems can be described as “converged systems,” with these converged systems combining the functionality of an appliance with the flexibility of an arbitrarily scalable system.
Some cloud-based expert management systems: (i) manage hybrid cloud infrastructure environments “out of the box;” (ii) combine integrated hardware and software in a manner that can be easily maintained; and (iii) include server machines (for example, server blades) that host virtual-machine-based compute nodes.
A cloud group in an expert integrated system consists of one or more “deployments.” Each deployment is a set of virtual machines located in the cloud. Each deployment is also broken into patterns, with each pattern providing different functionality. There is not generally a one-to-one correspondence between the virtual machines of a deployment and the patterns of the same deployment. The patterns include: (i) virtual machines (VMs); (ii) physical host computers (physical hosts); (iii) configurations (iv) policies; and (v) shared services.